While the big news in mobile commerce last week at CES was the partnership of Nokia and Visa for a Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payment solution… the real deal was already happening here in New York City with the launch of the New York City Mobile Trial sponsored by Nokia, Citibank, Mastercard and Cingular.

The two day launch event brought Cingular, Citibank and Mastercard customers from around the city to one of the speciality winter cafe’s set up in Bryant park (the park behind the New York Public library) for some hot chocolate, snacks and a new NFC phone.

Besides a few little bumps in getting the WAP push through to my phone to download the credit card information technology into the NFC chip in the Nokia 6126 they gave me the process went pretty smoothly. It was simply a mater of putting my SIM card into the new phone, making sure my registration was correct, receiving a WAP push, downloading the application, transferring my contacts to the phone and I was good to go.

The NFC chip actually sits on the front end of the Nokia flip phone which appears, from how I have been using it so far, to be the logical ergo-dynamic placement. The phone has to be on in order for the chip to be read (which is weird when you consider that a key fab is not something thats needs to be on ALL the time). But this is probably because of long term Buying Based Over The Air Marketing schemes that such a technology makes possible.

The Nokia 6126 with the NFC chip is a Cingular branded phone. Information about the chip and or its tag detection sit on top of the home screen which is comforting. The NFC application also gives you a couple of choices in terms of how you would like to handle your mobile commerce experience. The secure element setting allows me to either keep the chip always active (which means all I have to do swipe), in “ask first” mode (which asks if I want to make the payment after I swipe) and “ask for passcode” which asks you to enter a pin like number after every time you use the phone for payments.

I have to admit. I have had the phone for a week now and it is very very very convenient. I have been using it on the 6 train NYC subway system and at Duane Reade’s. I find my self wishing that more places used it. I mean, it makes sense and is very convenient. My phone is usually already out (or the easiest thing to grab) when I am paying for small things.

But credit card machines are not the only “tags” the NFC chip reads. All around the floor where various posters with tags that allowed your phone to access various promotional material but just holding your phone up to the icon. Holding my phone up to the icon on a “Because I Said So” movie poster pushed a message onto my phone asking me if I wanted to go to a WAP address which, when I say yes, brings me to a page where I can download the move trailer, ringtones and other promotional material. According to the people there we will start seeing this at Regal movie theaters and Cingular stores thought the city. Other examples of material that is experimenting with this are Zagat, Citibank (of course) and other LBS tinkerings.

I think that it is undoubtedly the case that this type NFC tag reading will become the real world connection technology of the future. It makes so much more sense and is so much less cumbersome then say, mobile bar-code readers. I just hold the phone of to the tag (which can be placed on ANYTHING) and whatever a barcode reader could do the NFC chip can do as well (as well as pay for the product later, which can create an interesting statistic to look at, in terms of how many people looked at your product and then bought it etc etc).

But one of the even more interesting feature that I spotted on the phone was a section called “Transmit To Tag.” It took a few people before anyone could tell me what it was. The phone info pop up tell me that it “allows you to transmit information to a tag. e.g. text message , call request, business card or bookmark.” At first I thought that this would be a way to send info from my phone by tapping it against the NFC chip of another phone (a feature that would be cool, but that is not what it is). Essentially, the “transmit to tag” function allows a user to program his / her own blank tag(s) with contact data, a URL, text message, or call initiation. That could be REALLY interesting in terms of allowing people to create their own “grassroot” tags for what ever purposes they see fit.

So. just imagine, your business card data is written to a tag using the phone. The tag gets attached to the back of a real business card. Someone than taps his or her NFC handset on your business card and the data is automatically placed in his phones contact list. No typing or bluetooth exchanges sync ups. Just tap and go.

Or just use the phone to create a tag that when tapped will download a promotional ringtone or movie trailer or to initiate an SMS when tapped. This could be used to vote for a favorite music video via SMS for example.

All in all its good to finally see this thing up and running over here in the States. Its an obvious idea that I think we will see more and more demand from as more people see it in action and expect and understand that they can get so much more out of their phone.

Related MOPocket Articles:

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Citibank gearing Up For Mobile Banking / Payment In The US.

Phone Money

Mobile Payment Tags: A Mobile Payment Solution

Technorati Tags: barcode, cingular, citi, citibank, mastercard, near field communication, NFC, nokia

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.